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A team of sleep researchers led by University of California, Riverside psychologist Sara C. Mednick has confirmed the mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate memory and found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid enhances the process. Those discoveries could lead to new sleep therapies that will improve memory for aging adults and those with dementia, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

“We found that a very common sleep drug can be used to increase verbal memory,” said Mednick. “This is the first study to show you can manipulate sleep to improve memory. It suggests sleep drugs could be a powerful tool to tailor sleep to particular memory disorders.”
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A new study out of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis finds that sleep is disrupted in people who likely have early Alzheimer's disease but do not yet have the memory loss or other cognitive problems characteristic of full-blown disease.

"This link may provide us with an easily detectable sign of Alzheimer's pathology," says senior author David M. Holtzman, MD, the Andrew B. and Gretchen P. Jones Professor and head of Washington University's Department of Neurology. "As we start to treat people who have markers of early Alzheimer's, changes in sleep in response to treatments may serve as an indicator of whether the new treatments are succeeding."
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Life expectancy hit an all-time high in 2009, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An American born in 2009 can now expect to live about 78 years and two months, a two month increase compared to 2008.
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